


Memory

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-25 23:15:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Stacker Pentecost is associated with some of the lowest, saddest moments of your life, Hercules Hansen, but there are good moments, too.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

> This is long. This is full of angst. The sex doesn't happen until many thousands of words in. 
> 
> Also, this incorporates a lot of the novelization secondary material, including the bit about there having been four days between the double and the triple events, rather than there being, like, the TWENTY MINUTES OR SO implied by the movies. 
> 
> Also, this takes as canon Travis Beacham's comments that strongly imply Scott Hansen is a creep rapist and, also, that Herc got him thrown out of the program because he saw Scott raping someone in the Drift. 
> 
> Also, I'm not Australian. Let's just handwave over diction and word selection and pretend that it all gets solved by the magic wand of the second person narration, OK?

Three days after Scissure, you're sitting on a cot in a relief shelter, head in your hands. By some miracle, a man gets you off the cot and into one of the on-base cars. He takes you past the guards, topside, and the two of you drive along deserted, silent streets to the coast. You don't say a bloody word to him the whole time, but he doesn't seem to mind. He doesn't try to make small talk, and despite yourself, Hercules Hansen, you find yourself breathing a little more deeply. This is the first non-recycled air you've smelled in a while, and on a beach, with the fresh breeze blowing in, it almost smells good. Feels good. 

Then, Stacker Pentecost points towards the ruins of North Sydney.

"Look at that, Mr. Hansen," he says, softly. 

The tears that have been choking your throat for seventy-eight hours rise up and overwhelm you. 

You sign up for the PPDC. Scott did it already and told Stacker Pentecost that he had a brother, even better pilot than he was. They were looking for trained pilots, weren't they? 

...

Twelve hours after you drop out of the neural handshake with a Category-3 on the horizon and two other teams depending on Lucky Seven, Stacker Pentecost is in the quarters you generally share with your brother and son. The kaiju alarm came in the middle of the night, so there is a dropped shirt on the back of one chair, a half-eaten protein bar on the table. Your son, Stacker tells you, is with Mako. They got breakfast and lunch in the canteen, and Stacker gave them permission to go down to the Shatterdome bay to see the restoration work being done on the other two Jaegers that fought and won. 

You flinch at the word fought. You flinch again at the word won. You imagine your son hasn't thought of you, except with anger, for at least eleven hours and forty-five minutes. Alternate phrasing: he hasn't thought of you, except with anger, since he was twelve. 

As for your brother -- Stacker considers the state of the room and the fact that you've been sitting in almost-darkness for twelve hours. He looks at your face. The tone of his voice is hard when he says, "What happened, Mr. Hansen?" 

Flat, with all the emotion stripped out of your voice, you tell him what you saw in the Drift. What you felt with your own skin, because you've been drifting with your brother for so long. It's been years since either of you has chased a RABIT, but you were there, in the memory, in his body, putting himself in -- even in the barely-there glow of the overhead emergency lighting, you can see the anger move over Pentecost's face. 

To his credit, Pentecost doesn't ask if you're sure. He pauses, thinks. Then, he asks whether you would be willing to testify against your brother: you tell him that you would be, but it turns out not to mean anything. The girl doesn't want to press charges against Scott Hansen, famous Jaeger pilot whose face is on the covers of magazines. 

Also: there is no precedent for the admission of testimony, obtained in the Drift, in an American court of law. 

...

Stacker Pentecost is associated with some of the lowest, saddest moments of your life, Hercules Hansen, but there are good moments, too. 

All the times, for example, when Jaegers come back. All the times the two of you have been in a meeting with civilian command and worked at a team to squeeze resources out of the shirts -- you still remember the first time you looked across the table, and Stacker made a tiny, microscopic movement of the shoulders, so you played the irritated PPDC field officer coming to the edge of violence after crossing over the bridge of shouting, and Stacker, the calmer, saner one proposing, maybe, a ten percent increase instead of a four percent cut. 

When the kids were at the Academy, in the first unit, the cadets were restricted to fifteen minutes of calls a week: Chuck tells Mako she can have his time, so they sign up for back-to-back slots, but Mako can't get the full half-hour unless Chuck is in there with her, so the two of them are stuck in the video call booth for half an hour. Mako is both dutiful and genuinely excited to talk to Stacker, and between the two of them, between the mix of mostly English and occasional phrase of Japanese, they find a way to bring to let you know what Chuck has been doing. Your son sits next to Mako, arms crossed over his chest, doing his best to look sullen and uncooperative, but you remember the quick way he looks up when Mako said he won a Kwoon match against one of the O'Donnell boys from North Dakota, each of whom were twice Chuck's age, highly regarded prospects going into the Academy. Chuck won four touches to two. You were grinning, and the way that Chuck couldn't help -- 

...

You do not think you'd be on the same terms with Stacker if it weren't for the kids. 

In fact, you know you wouldn't be. You love your kid. He loves his. The two of you have a professional relationship, at least up until the point you suggest, rather awkwardly, the kids should be introduced: Stacker considers this, then agrees with you. One Saturday afternoon, you bring Chuck to Stacker's. The two of you go into Stacker's study to do a little work and maybe have a beer and listen carefully for signs that one of them is quietly killing the other. 

Turns out to be unnecessary. Four minutes later, they're screaming at the top of their lungs -- your little shit of a son told the kaiju orphan about how the only reason Pentecost took her was because her family didn't want her, and he is still screaming it even after you and Stacker separate them. For her part, Mako is screaming right back in Japanese, and Stacker wants to hold her back, but doesn't want to hurt her, and Mako is doing her damned best to climb Stacker like a tree so she can leap off his shoulders and rip Chuck's head off. 

You're not sure at what point they figure it out, or how many fistfights take place out of your sight and Stacker's, but eventually, they do. 

It helps that for a long time, they're the only kids near each other's age on any Shatterdome. 

...

When Chuck is fifteen and Mako is fifteen and Stacker is thirty-three and you are thirty-eight and kaiju don't come more than once every three months, the four of you drive from the Los Angeles Shatterdome to Seattle. One thousand one hundred eighty-four miles, as they count them in America, spread out over seven days. Good memories, beginning with Stacker announcing that he had gotten a _proper_ bargain on a caravan that could be sold in Seattle for more than what he'd bought it for, then the despairing look Mako gave you over her shoulder when he brought it around and the thing could be heard before it was seen. 

Long golden afternoons with the window rolled down, either you or Stacker driving, cursing a little about Americans driving on the wrong side of the road. The other in the passenger seat, sunglasses and a map, half asleep. Pulling over at a state park that had not been on the itinerary and the kids running for their swimsuits, and the two of you standing on shore, watching the kids dive into the lake. _When did Mako learn to swim?_ , Stacker said, a little bewildered. _Is it on the Academy curriculum?_

It was, but you added that Mako probably learned before the Academy: Angela had a cousin who drowned when young, so she started Chuck on classes early, and the kids had all that time in Lima together. 

Saying _Angela_ and then talking about her in the past tense still hurt, but being able to surprise Stacker with a fact about the kids felt good. 

Good memories. 

...

A beautiful week. A week of driving and being a passenger and watching the kids clamber over rocks and dive into cold water and invade rest areas and campgrounds and build fires and put up a tent. A week of listening to Chuck and Mako argue, every night, about marshmallow roasting technique. You and Stacker split a six-pack of beers a couple nights, and you remember the expression of pain on Stacker's face the time Mako and Chuck disappeared after dinner and came back an hour and a half later. Mako claimed she wanted to see what the karaoke night they'd seen flyers for, but you and Stacker both thought Chuck looked too smug for that to be true: then, the next morning when you were checking out, the woman at the counter saw Chuck lurking at the door. 

She leaned over. "So we won't see you or Mako tonight, Chuck?" 

You turned and stared at him. He shrugged. "Mako dared me." 

You looked back at the woman, and the surprise on your face made her laugh: you never find out what he sang, but when the caravan breaks down a hundred miles from Seattle, you and Chuck are on good enough terms to walk the mile and a half to the gas station in friendly, companionable silence to arrange for the tow truck. 

...

At the same time: neither of the kids was legal enough to drive in America or buy beer, but at the end of the trip, Chuck was going to be your copilot in Striker Eureka. Stacker and Mako were going up to Anchorage; it was going to be an extended posting, and the kids weren't going to see each other for at least a year. Longer, if Stacker lost his fight to keep Jaegers from being assigned permanently instead of rotating through to keep countries from regarding specific Jaegers as their own.

Also: the four of you were never more than an hour and a half away from an airfield that could get you and Chuck to Seattle in a hurry if a kaiju showed. 

Also: every morning, you and Stacker take your metharocin. Chuck is on a preventative dosage, and Mako sits a little way apart and watches the three of you, a careful, blank expression on her face. 

...

You remember -- 

...

You remember Scissure, you remember Spinejackal, and you remember Mayhem, the kaiju that you and Scott had gotten into the Drift to fight when you saw Scott on top of a woman who was trying to push him off. There was a moment when you could have turned away, but the moment passed. After that, you were down inside the RABIT, inside Scott's skin, inside a woman who was drunk and crying. 

The kaiju responsible for this particular memory is Rachnid, who you and Chuck fought solo outside Brisbane -- big, fast, ugly even for a Category-4 kaiju as they were coming through the Breach at the end of 2024. A harder fight than Mutavore, who had been big, but nothing special: with Rachnid, there were acid-tipped spines and eight legs and twenty-foot long fangs. You don't know what would have happened to a less-experienced, less-angry pilot pair in a slower, older Jaeger. Died, probably, or forced to activate the self-destruct to keep the kaiju from making landfall. 

Rachnid set a half-dozen spines into Striker Eureka, four into your side and two into Chuck's -- you were gripping the fangs on the right while Chuck drove the stinger blade again and again into the abdomen. The two in Chuck's side were fifteen feet long each and buried in the torso, rather than the arms. Say what they will about the Drift and shared pain: things that happen on Chuck's side burn him more. Things that happen on yours burn you more. The two of you will never be a matched set, but in the moments where you are waiting for the medics, you don't care. Chuck is screaming that he is burning, that his skin is on fire. He is trying to rip his Drivesuit off, and you are desperately trying to stop him. He is clawing at his the surface of the plastic with his hands, trying to find the catches, and you have to -- 

How long is it until the medical choppers arrive? 

When they do come, they've been hearing Chuck screaming on the Conn-Pod the whole ride out, so they work fast. No questions. Chuck disappears out of Striker, strapped to a gurney being raised into a helicopter, medics hanging on either side of him and arguing about whether they can give him more sedative without losing him, and he is still screaming. He is burning; he is begging for his mother, _please_. His voice breaks. Where is his mother?

Your legs fold. 

You pass out.

Four days later, PPDC command dispatches Striker to defend Kuching in Malaysia. Seven days later, with the kaiju twenty miles out and closing, Chuck is dry-eyed. He only flinches a little when they seal the armor around him. 

...

So you remember a lot of things. 

...

Against the memory of Chuck flinching when being put back into a Drivesuit, you set the memory of him in the lake with Mako that afternoon. Golden light, them diving off rocks and coming up arguing, Stacker Pentecost sitting next to you on the slope above and wincing over how his little kaiju orphan had acquired, and was unafraid to use as the situation suggested, prime vocabulary from rough-tongued Shatterdome roustabouts from Vladivostok to Lima. You remind Stacker that the first time your kids met, they got into a fight. You still remember the screaming. 

"I remember too," Stacker says, rubbing the back of his head. "She didn't even know what he said. All she knew was that he was trying to insult her." 

Then, he grins. So do you. 

...

Against the memory of being in your brother's skin, you set the memory of Chuck's sudden, absolute delight that you're delighted with him doing well at the Academy. 

What can you set against the memory of standing on that beach, looking at the ruins of North Sydney, three days after the second nuke? 

...

You remember being in the room when Stacker came out in a blue suit that was not his PPDC dress blues for the first time in over a decade: he had been planning to buy a series of identical suits from a local department store, but Mako put her foot down. Stacker says this, a little embarrassed. Instead, Stacker gets his post-Anchorage shutdown suits and shirts from a Hong Kong tailor, someone whose name Mako got from methodical, scientific polling of Shatterdome staff who could be relied to contribute something worthwhile to the project of making sure her _sensei_ looked good. Tendo Choi and Vanessa Gottlieb were allowed to contribute. Newton Geiszler was not. 

The next time you're in Hong Kong, Mako insists that you come along to see how Stacker looks in the suit: if this works out, she says, they'll make additional ones from the same pattern, in the same cloth. The base pattern has already been tweaked once, but she wants your opinion. _What do I know?_ you ask her, but she looks at you with her eyebrows up, as if the answer to why she wants you to go is self-evident and obvious. 

She wins. You take the subway out to Tsim Sha Tsui with her, and when Stacker comes out, you have to admit that she was right. The tailor and his assistant dart around with tape, pulling, adjusting a little, but before they do, Mako goes up to Stacker. She touches the lapels, brushes something imaginary off the shoulders. 

"You look strong," she says in English. 

Then, she says a phrase in Japanese, and Stacker smiles, a little ruefully. He looks down at her, shakes his head, and then Mako looks up at him with a defiant, almost angry set in her jaw. 

You can't set this memory against North Sydney and Angela.

You should have known Stacker was dying. 

...

Are you consciously aware of wanting Stacker Pentecost? You have little context for wanting a man. You are, as far as you can figure, a man who is sexually interested in women. You married a woman; you had a son with her. Ten years later, you still dream about the way her waist felt under your hand or the way she bit her lower lip when you were inside her and she was close. In the years since, you've had a few short weekenders, all with women. Ann in Manila. Elizabeth in Los Angeles. 

So are you conscious of wanting Stacker? 

Over time, you become aware of how Stacker is your best friend, how you watch him closely. When the two of you are in the same physical space, you're intensely aware of his position in the room and what he is doing or is about to do. He turns, you turn. He starts to stand, and your legs tense to follow. You aren't going to set memories of Stacker against memories of North Sydney and Angela, but the thought occurs to you. It's present. In Hong Kong, while he is standing there in one of the blue suits that Mako bullied him into getting, after you tell Raleigh that you're sorry about his brother, Stacker turns to you. 

He says, _Shall we go, Herc?_ You smile at him. 

At night, sometimes, without really wanting to, you think about his voice.

...

Most of the time, you aren't consciously aware of wanting Stacker Pentecost.

That isn't the same as not wanting him, though. The night after the double event, you're drunk. 

...

Stacker knocks, and you let him in: you and Chuck haven't lived together for years. You offer Stacker a seat. He sits. You offer him some of what you're drinking, actual, actual store-bought instead of base moonshine, a birthday present from Striker's crew a while back, and Stacker says yes, so you find a glass and pour him a finger's worth. He picks up the glass. He has a little, and he makes a comment to you about it being good stuff, but you can't look him in the eye because you are so goddamn ashamed of yourself for disconnecting out of the motion harness. It's your fault that your collar bone is broken. You'd asked if they did surgery today, when the collar bone would be stable enough for you to fight. Pins, maybe? Screws? You can take pain. 

The doctor had looked at you with an expression of pity that burned straight through you, and -- 

The lights are off. Hong Kong Shatterdome was the first Shatterdome built, and it turns inwards, so most rooms don't have windows: the only lighting in the room are the emergency strips overhead, plus a light that you realize Stacker must have turned on when he came in. At one point, Stacker leans over, and you think it's to see just how much you've drunk. Not that much in absolute terms, but the combination of painkillers for the broken collar bone and hard liquor have done you in. In a daze, you breathe out. Stacker is there. You blink, and when you open your eyes, you realize that Stacker is still there, still leaning forward, eyes closed. He leans forward another fraction of a part of an inch. The hand he has on the table slides forward, and you are vividly aware of just how close he is to you. He is wearing a clean navy suit with a clean blue shirt underneath. The collar is unbuttoned. 

You realize that he came over to, that he wants to -- 

He pulls back and opens his eyes.

You are let your breath out, heart beating so hard inside your chest that it has to be the reason why your collar bone hurts, but when Stacker stands, your legs still tense. You still half-stand. It's a habit of a decade, and it's a habit of a decade, too, that when you see his expression, you sit down. 

"You have every right to be drunk tonight," he says, quietly. "It was bad luck, Herc." 

You look away. 

Stacker reaches over -- you see him move out of the corner of your right eye. He picks up the bottle and puts another finger of whisky into his glass. He drinks both fingers down quick, still standing, then shows himself out. 

The second night after the double event, arm in that goddamn sling, as clean as you can goddamn get yourself with your broken collar bone and the painkillers and misery, you are outside Stacker's quarters. 

You knock with your good hand. 

...

You and Stacker know that the kids were boyfriend and girlfriend at some point: as recently as Bonesquid, you think. 

In fact, Mako flew out by herself to visit three times, once when you and Chuck were working out of Sydney and twice when the two of you were stationed in Manila. You never got advance warning; you found out when you saw her in the canteen, usually sitting next to Chuck. Mako always smiled, then slid over or made room for you, and the first time she stayed a week. The second and third times, she stayed the better part of a month and did some consulting with the K-Science division. 

As far as you know, she stayed with Chuck, and pretty regularly, the three of you would have dinner at the same table in the canteen, eating off trays and talking Shatterdome and Jaeger business. You don't know if your son took her out for a nice dinner off the Shatterdome at any point; you suggested it, awkwardly, at one point, and he told you to mind your own goddamn business. 

You also didn't realize, until you saw him watching her eat in the canteen, just how far gone Chuck was on her. How long had he felt that way about her? Did Mako feel the same way? You couldn't read her the same way, but she had to. She flew across the Pacific three times to see him, didn't she? She was sleeping in his quarters, staying with him night after night. Once, you sat down across from them in the canteen when you could have sworn they were holding hands under the table. 

...

On the second-to-last day she was in Sydney, they came back to the Shatterdome with a ball of wrinkles. 

"His name is Max," Mako said, smiling like she was fifteen again and had just surfaced from diving off a rock into a lake in Oregon. 

Your son looked -- well, you've never seen him look at anything the way he looked at Mako when she had that dog in her lap, except maybe Striker Eureka. Maybe not even his Jaeger. You are aware that Missy, your technical crew chief, was starting to accept bets about the appearance of a ring. 

Mako visited without Stacker one more time. 

...

Then, nothing. 

Then, mentioning Mako's name would make Chuck's face twist with contempt. 

To this day, you don't know what happened. You tried asking Chuck once, in what you thought was a roundabout way, and he slammed the wrench in his hand down, walked away, and didn't talk to you for a week. You haven't brought it up with Stacker. 

...

So Chuck and Mako and their long history together has something to do with why you're standing here outside Stacker's door. So does the fact that because you are a goddamn fool who disconnected from his motion harness when he wasn't supposed to. As a result your son is going to make that suicide bomb run in Striker Eureka without you. Who is going to be in the Conn-Pod with him? Theoretically, it could be one of the other Drift-compatible pilots. In truth, you know who it'll be. Stacker knows who it'll be. 

That is the largest part of why you're outside Stacker's door, your hair combed as well as you can manage with one hand. He dressed to come see you. You're going to dress, as best as you can, to see him. You took almost half an hour trying to shave yourself in one-handed. Trying to get into your boots with only one good hand was a long, frustrating experience involving at least one instance of out-and-out screaming when you tried to do something inadvisable. 

You knock on the door with your good hand. 

Silence. 

You call out, so that Stacker will know it's you, and a few seconds later, the door opens. Stacker is in an undershirt and boxers; his dog tags are around his neck, silvery gray and with the blue silencers of command staff, rather than the black of active Jaeger pilots: your dog tags are edged black. So are Chuck's. You imagine Mako is, with Raleigh Becket and some amount of ceremony, exchanging her green Shatterdome technical staff for black Jaeger pilot ones. 

He looks at you. 

You look at him. 

You step through the door, and he closes it behind you. 

...

Chuck and Mako and your foolishness and bad luck have something to do with why you're in Stacker Pentecost's quarters, but the main reason you're standing there, arm in a sling, Stacker more undressed than you've seen him since that week of driving from Los Angeles to Seattle -- 

You step close to Stacker. When he doesn't move away, you kiss him. You've never kissed a man before, but you go in assuming it works on same principles as kissing a woman. You're right in a general sense. It's still a mouth and tongue and running your hands over a body that is new to you, but the fine details are different. Stacker is the same height as you, so the angle is unfamiliar. He is broader in the shoulders. When you touch your tongue to his, he gets hard against your hip. 

Startled, you take step backward. 

Stacker breathes out, carefully. He is hard enough that you can see it in his underwear. HIs mouth is wet from yours, and before he can open his mouth and say that this doesn't need to happen, you can walk out of that door, no problem, you unbuckle your belt. You keep your eyes on Stacker's face. Working by touch but fumbling because you're right-handed and this is your left hand and your heart is beating fast and hard, you undo the two buttons at the top of your trousers. Then, you unzip. You don't step out of your trousers, but you watch Stacker breathe out, slowly, not quite believing. He looks down, then back up. You step in close again. 

You kiss him, slow and thorough. When you pause, you feel Stacker breathe out around your mouth. 

Still using your left hand, you take Stacker's left hand and put it on your stomach. He pauses for a moment, but you don't change your mind, so he slides his palm down. 

...

You may not have been consciously aware before of wanting Stacker, but in bed, you are. 

Stacker, you're coming to realize, has been consciously aware of wanting you for a long time. 

...

In the morning, you wash, carefully, slowly at Stacker's. You didn't bring clothes to change into, but you brought your metharocin, and you and Stacker split water from his toothbrush glass. He has a spare toothbrush he can give you, and he also also gives you a hand with the boots. After that, you meet Chuck at breakfast. After that, eight hours with Striker: your ground chief has distinct ideas about the sequence in which Striker's electrical systems should be checked and brought back along, and a third of her crew made the trip to Hong Kong. Consequently, she sends Chuck up the inside of Stacker's arm with a voltage checker: you know you'd be there too, except for your collar bone. Instead, you stand on the bay floor and look where she tells you. Your collar bone aches. 

"Still don't know what the hell that pulse was," Missy says, arms crossed over her chest, the line of her mouth flat. 

You use your foot to nudge Max away from drooling on a toolbox. Chuck doesn't make eye contact with you when he comes back down.

...

That night, Stacker slides off the edge of the bed and gets down between your knees: you sigh when his tongue touches the underside of your dick, and you lean back on the bed and close your eyes. It feels, by and large, like a blowjob from a woman except for the details: the smell of the bed you're in, the touch of his beard, the sound you hear when you thrust up. It's recognizably Stacker's voice, but _different_. The palm on your right knee is broad. 

You loop your left leg over Stacker's back.

...

"We have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other." 

...

Chuck comes by one night when you're getting ready to go over Stacker's -- you don't know it at the time, but it's the night before the triple event. Max is following, and he trots around your quarters, sniffing and snorting, while Chuck helps you into a fresh shirt, then your boots. Chuck knows, you think, where you were going: instead, wordlessly, once you're dressed, the two of you re-route to the canteen. Old patterns hold. Chuck finds an empty table. He keeps hold of Max, since Max isn't allowed up into the food area, and you come down with two trays. 

Both of you eat in silence. Chuck feeds Max half the food on his tray. 

After both of you are done eating, Chuck puts his hat on, calls Max, and walks away. 

...

Here's what happens the night before: you eat dinner with your son, then you go to Stacker's. The door is unlocked, and there is a handwritten note on the table: it's been years since you've seen Stacker's spiky handwriting, but it's familiar enough. The note says he had to step out for a meeting, but will be back. _Stay if you would like._

You can't get out of your boots without a struggle, so you sit down in one of chairs that faces the window showing Hong Kong. You watch lights come on across the bay. The dark patches in the middle of light, you're guessing, are the areas destroyed by Otachi before Gipsy Danger beat it. 

...

That night, Stacker fucks you on your back. Your first time would be easier if you were on your hands and knees: you only have one good hand and a torso that seizes with pain when touched wrong. You can't brace yourself against the wall, and you still have your shirt on, dog tags lying on your chest. You'll need a shower after this, so why take your arm out of the sling twice? 

But you told Stacker, in a strangled voice, what you wanted, and Stacker takes his time making it happen: first, kissing standing up, with your arm in a sling between the two of you. Then, kissing on the bed, with Stacker undoing your belt and getting your boots and trousers and underwear off. He gives you half of a blowjob with one well-slicked finger inside you. Then, two fingers, then three for a long time, while you stroked yourself and listened to Stacker's voice in your ear, telling you what he saw. You'd thought about this a dozen times, maybe, over the past ten years -- all that you'd let yourself think about it. 

You get used to the feeling of something wide and stretching inside you. It hurt, and it doesn't hurt. Then, Stacker puts on a condom. He gets between your knees again and pushes in, and when he's all the way inside, he moans. The sound goes straight through you. It's heat and electricity at the same time, and you close your eyes and push against him. He moans again. 

For a while, very little hurts. 

...

When the two of you are in the bathroom and Stacker is carefully maneuvering your arm out of the sling in a way that minimizes the pain, you see a pair of matching old burn scars in the small of his back. They're roughly the shape and size of a Mark I spine port. 

Souvenir of the three hours he spent fighting Onibaba solo, he says. 

"Insurrector?" he asks, pointing to the knot of scar tissue on the inside of your right knee. You know he felt it under his palm the night before. 

You nod. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see the right side of your body, from neck to elbow, a vivid, remarkable mix of yellow and purple and green and black. 

...

You know Stacker is going into Striker Eureka. 

You can't shave yourself. You can't wash your right armpit without contortions. Putting and taking off boots takes fifteen minutes if nobody helps you, and the twenty minutes of hand and arm exercises a day that medical assigned leaves you shaking and cold with sweat. So how can you move your share of two thousand tons of titanium in a combat situation with multiple kaiju? Stacker is going in your place, and without being asked, starting the morning after the double event, you start piecing together a Driftsuit for Stacker. None of the cadets on station are as tall or big in the shoulders as Stacker, so he can't borrow one of theirs, and Tendo has his hands full with repairing Gipsy Danger. Also, who knows Striker better than you? You've been her pilot for five years. You had Lucky Seven before that, and Missy supplies any technical specifications you aren't sure about. 

You find pieces in storage. Stacker's old suit measurements are still on file, so you mix and match. You go through the suit lockers of every cadet left at the Shatterdome: nobody needs to ask what you need the pieces for. You commandeer a tech or two to make repairs and tweaks to a couple pieces, and when the triple event happens, you walk into the prep bay at Stacker's right hand. You call for the suit in Drawer D-23. 

Stacker looks at you, eyebrows up. 

"Things have changed a little since your day, mate," you say. 

Stacker snorts, but believes you. It's been a decade since he put on a Driftsuit, and you stay while the technicians put the armor on him, locking the chest piece and the shoulder pieces into place. You get them to size up the spinal lock plate because something with gaps won't cut it with Striker's neural fire rate; you ask Stacker how it fits through the arms, and you take him through the paces for the rockets and the brass knuckles and stinger blades to make sure that he can articulate as he needs to. The torso plate is a little tight, you tell Stacker, but it was the only one that came close to fitting. There wasn't time to machine any parts from scratch: to your professional eye, it'll do well enough, and at the end of it, Stacker holds his helmet and considers you. You know he is thinking about Mako standing in cramped tailor's store in Tsim Sha Tsui that Vanessa Gottlieb swore did the best men's suits for the most reasonable price. The overhead lights, the smell of dusty fabric and tailor's chalk, the sound of sewing machines in the back, and the white noise from the air conditioning unit. 

For a moment, with the two of you standing in front of each other and the kaiju warning lights flashing in the background and technicians fiddling with the greaves, you think Stacker is going to say something. 

Then, that moment passes. 

So you lean up -- in the Drivesuit boots, he is taller than you are, and he has the helmet under his arm. You do what you should have done in that tailor's shop, probably what Mako hoped you would do. 

With your left hand, you pull Stacker's head down. You kiss him. 

...

In the hallway, you say goodbye to your son. 

...

You say -- 

...

Your son doesn't expect Stacker Pentecost to come out of the prep bay in a Driftsuit. There is something deep and painful about the idea that he doesn't expect to pilot Striker unless it's with you. 

Standing in the hallway, calling after Stacker that he has your son, everything is -- 

...

In the end, is your son less than he might otherwise have been? Yes. Part of it was your raising of him, and part of it was the world you had to do it in. Kaiju and glory as the youngest Jaeger pilot ever at the age of sixteen, then five long years of a slow, losing fight against an enemy that was getting stronger every time. The two of you were Drift compatible. 

On the other hand, too, he could have been worse. What if you'd died, and he'd been raised by Scott? He might still be a Ranger, but you don't want to think about -- 

In the end, Chuck was enough of a man to walk away from you in the hallway, climb into a Conn-Pod, and go down to the bottom of the sea because the world needed him to, and you think more of him for the fact that he didn't want to die. Even though he didn't want to die, when all other options involved either mission failure or leaving his Jaeger partner to die alone, he flipped the switch for manual override. As far as you can tell, the last sentence he ever says involves calling you his _father_. He does his part. 

How can you do anything else? When the pods from Gipsy Danger surface, you order choppers out to the position. You tell the Shatterdome to turn off the war clock. 

You let the cheering wash over you. You breathe in. You breathe out. 

...

You remember the curve on the road stretching away, and you remember Chuck walking next to you: this is the weeklong road trip that happened when Chuck was fifteen and you were thirty-eight. At the beginning of the year, he came up to a little above the chin. Now, he was almost to your nose. Medical staff said he hadn't hit his growth spurt yet, and somewhere along this walk, he'd picked up a stick that he was trailing along behind him. The caravan broke down; Stacker could use the satphone to call, but why bother? You volunteered, and Chuck tagged along, which surprised you. You thought he would've either spent the time with Mako or poking around in the hills alone. 

Instead, he was next to you. His stride was almost as long as yours, and you remember, with painful clarity, those thirty or so wordless minutes it took the two of you to walk the mile and a half. The trees were dark and green on your left; the Pacific Ocean glittered on your right, and for a brief period in time, you and Chuck were at peace with each other. 

...

Years before, you thought about setting your son against the memory of Angela and North Sydney: you'd gotten him out of there, and you hadn't done a perfect job raising him, but he turned out all right. What his heart wanted was decent enough. He was alive. 

"My father always said that -- "

...

In the end, Hercules Hansen, you learn. 

In the end, Hercules Hansen, you have no choice but to learn: all that you can set against loss is memory. 

...

All you can do is continue living.

**Author's Note:**

> So uh, this fic is every feeling I have about Stacker and Mako and Chuck and Herc thrown into a food processor set to OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD I LOVE THEM OH GOD PAIN. 
> 
> All the good ideas in this are lifted from the fandom Drift. The road trip was inspired by the art of [schwarzbrot](http://schwarzbrot.tumblr.com/post/59825328906/pacific-rim-roadtrip-au-first-batch-whew-i-have) and the writing [siterlas](http://siterlas.tumblr.com/) did of it omg. Chuck and Mako daring each other into doing things is from [motleypatches](http://motleypatches.tumblr.com). Any pieces of Hansen characterization that are remotely accurate are 100% [harrietvane](http://harrietvane.tumblr.com/), who wrote me an Aussie bloke primer. 
> 
> Written while listening to "Bury Your Burdens in the Ground" by William Elliott Whitmore on, like, repeat 3,000,000 times.


End file.
